Advertising billboards are scattered throughout a variety of places. For example, billboards are located along highways and other roads so as to advertise products or services to drivers passing by the billboards. Billboards are also located in other areas, such as along railroad tracks, on the sides of buildings, and generally in any location where potential customers may pass by. As such, billboards present a major source of advertising revenue for media companies operating and controlling the billboards.
Billboards can be owned by individuals, companies, or other entities who are often assisted by brokerage firms who facilitate renting billboards to advertisers for specified periods of time. Typically, brokerage firms have relationships with the owners of billboards in a specific geographical region. Often, the brokerage firms employ one or more salespeople who interact with various advertisers by providing the advertisers with information regarding the availability, price, geographical location, and other relevant information. In regions where more than one brokerage firm operates the billboards, advertisers may have to contact multiple parties in order to rent billboard space over several billboards in a region.
Due in part to the fractured nature of the business, there are many billboards at any given time that are not being utilized simply because advertisers do not know about, or have access to information about, those billboards. Billboards can sit empty or unchanged for long periods of time. For example, a billboard may display a message such as “Advertise Here” and provide contact information for parties interested in renting or leasing the billboard. Another billboard may display an advertising message from the most recent advertiser to lease the billboard because the advertiser's lease ended and the billboard owner has not spent resources necessary to remove the old message and possibly replace it with another one. One reason billboards sit empty is due to the difficulty in conveying information about the availability of various billboards to potential advertisers, who cannot easily determine information such as the amount of traffic expected to pass by a particular billboard over a given period of time versus the cost of that billboard. Moreover, as advertisers often consider billboards as part of a broader advertising strategy, the difficulty in determining billboard availability in a larger, regional, national or other context, also can result in billboards sitting empty or advertising dollars not being optimized.